Are Your Expenses Breaking The Bank?

Employee expenses are something for which many companies still use a paper-based process. Employees are responsible for entering their mileage for business travel, as well as company expenses for subsistence, accommodation, etc. But just how honest are these claims – and is your expense process a source of unnecessary overspend?

Control expenses

By controlling what people can claim, total annual expenditure is significantly reduced. Mileage claims are validated automatically, categories of expenses can be capped and duplicates are trapped at source. All expenditure is tracked and transparent; savings of 8% to 14% are typical by utilising an online expense management system, such as Expense On Demand. Employees may not be aware that by rounding up their mileage or claiming a bit extra for ‘entertaining’ that they are contributing to a huge annual bill for the business. Some employees may deliberately inflate their claims in order to make money from the company above and beyond their total reward.

Many employees will automatically round up their business mileage and therefore the amount for which they are claiming. By using expense management software, this ’rounding up’ is eliminated as the system calculates the accurate distance between 2 locations and processes the claim accordingly. The expense system will also calculate the shortest route and so employees taking a slightly detoured journey, in order to claim more, will no longer be able to ‘game the system’.

With an expense system such as EOD, a business is able to set up rules based on the employee and the category of claim. A senior director may be able to claim below a particular amount without verification, whereas another employee may be limited on the amount they can spend on accommodation or entertainment, as opposed to allowing them to spend the money and then validate the claim at a later date.

Save time

Expense On Demand can reduce the time needed to process expense claims by at least 50%. Claims are approved electronically and arrive in Finance fully coded, validated and approved, ready to be paid. A payment file is then uploaded electronically to the payment system, so there is no re-keying required. Statutory tax treatments and internal business rules are applied to each transaction to enforce compliance throughout your organisation. Exception reporting provides the means to track breaches and then instigate corrective action.

Report and analyse

The claim and spending trends can then be reported on and analysed by the business, in order to achieve further savings. Expense On Demand incorporates an extensive suite of standard reports that may be run at any time, enabling management and/or your Finance department to analyse claims and areas of the process that can be streamlined or improved. Also provided is an on-board report writer that enables you to create bespoke reports in minutes using any combination of the data fields. All reports may be exported in CSV file format to Excel or any other management system.

Claim from anywhere, at any time

Organisations with a widespread workforce, such as field-based sales teams or maintenance staff, are able to manage expense claims centrally and efficiently. Claims may be entered online from anywhere at any time. If internet access is not available, claims can be entered offline and then uploaded later. Many users submit claims from home or from their hotels. In India and China, people use internet kiosks to submit their expenses.